Over the years, marketers have focused their campaign measurements around more traditional metrics such as clicks, unique visitors, leads and opportunities. While marketing teams will never fully divert away from these metrics to demonstrate the business impact their campaigns are having, they need extra help, especially as the competition is increasing.

In fact, almost 600,000 new UK businesses set up shop in 2017 alone meaning that, to truly stand out and drive a business in the modern world, marketers must think more strategically about focusing activity and the additional metrics they should be tracking.

Here are four of the most important questions marketers should answer, if they want their campaigns to make a truly tangible impact on their business:

How can you capture your buyers’ interest?

It’s inevitable that those in charge of a business want their marketing teams to shout about and share their organisation’s vision around new products. Despite this, it’s not the products themselves that are of interest to potential buyers, instead, it’s how these solutions solve their – or their customers’ –problems.

While it sounds incredibly simple, understanding this thought process is still one of the most important factors in getting buyers to make a purchase. But how can you find out what your audience’s pain points are? You can test it through advertising, landing pages, social media outreach and any other form of data collection.

It’s this insight into what exactly makes a buyer sit up and pay attention to a brand which is critical to getting them to market. It doesn’t matter how small this pain point is. Just by finding it and addressing it again and again across different mediums means you will capture buyers.

How quickly can customers see value?

A small but important piece of advice, it needs to be quick.

Technological advancements have created increased expectations of customer experience. Buyers today want immediate satisfaction. They need (and want) to understand the value your product brings their business and if/when they choose you, they expect to see results, fast.

Typically, humans don’t tend to be kind to software. We want it to work well and we want it to work instantly. As marketers, it is vital we understand and address our customer’s need for instant gratification by identifying what value looks like to them. Is it the first time they see results from the product? Perhaps it’s a smooth implementation process? Once this value is discovered, it’s important to track how fast each user is getting to their own valuable moment and help speed up the process where possible.

Are your customers truly engaged?

To really understand whether or not your customers are actually engaging with your product, data collection is paramount. Analysing how they are using your products allows you to determine between those who are just users vs. those who are truly engaged and using the product/service in a way that positively impacts business outcomes.

In order to find this, you firstly need to ensure tracking and analysis are set up for the features and activities which are most important in defining how engaged a user is. Once this is complete, the data can then be harnessed to look for trends which, upon identification, make it possible to understand just how likely a customer is to either continue using your product, or to leave. Businesses are then afforded the opportunity to develop a strategy to turn unengaged customers into enthusiasts and prevent them leaving for good.

Do you have customers or advocates?

Customers and advocates are two very different things and it’s vital that once your audience is actively using your product or service, you do everything possible to turn them into an advocate. But how can you encourage and track this activity?

As in all other aspects of marketing, you need to be data-driven. One example of this could be through tracking your Net Promotor Score (NPS). NPS quickly identifies whether a customer would or wouldn’t advocate you and your product to others. Ideally, marketing teams should set it up to run ongoing assessments on a bi-annual basis so to track how it changes over time, allowing them to act accordingly if it starts reacting negatively.

There are other ways to track advocacy which can help focus marketing teams on the right activities, too. For example, here at Looker, we are tracking how many times customers or partners mention us on their own social channels, blogs or at speaking events. We’re also creating an advocacy community to give our most engaged customers more reasons to talk about us.

In conclusion, there are a whole host of actions marketing teams can take in order to truly drive a business forward. However, data plays a pivotal role in helping find those unique metrics which can help the marketing team drive business value.

 

By Jen Grant, chief marketing officer at Looker

PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.

comments powered by Disqus